SAN ANTONIO — “Killers of the Flower Moon” may be 206 minutes long – 206 simmering, harrowing minutes – but we’ve barely heard the first audible hollering from “Eras Tour” attendees the next screen over before wondering if we didn’t miss a crucial bit of information introducing us to the world of Martin Scorsese’s latest, where wolves in sheep's clothing roam on two legs and operate under the mask of neighborly solidarity.
This being a Scorsese picture – the self-reinventing and self-examining director’s 26th narrative feature, and the one most explicitly reflective of what’s gnawing at him in this particular era of a dynamic artistic career – we can expect it will be through violence that true motivations reveal themselves. It isn’t always in a Scorsese-told story that violence will be brutal to witness; sometimes it’s funny, caustic, ironic, even spectacular. Sometimes it’s spiritual, or cerebral, or self-inflicted; it can take the form of a hilariously agonizing climb into a sports car or as a peek-through-your-fingers comedy-show confession.
In “Killers of the Flower Moon,” adapted by Scorsese and Eric Roth from David Grann's 2017 book of the same name, violence has begun shaping the terrain of 1920s Osage Tribe territory before we meet those inhabiting it. It broods like a never-ending storm, and lashes out like lightning. You’re never quite ready for the flash. But the subsequent rumble stays in your gut, as baked into the story of this land as the underground rivers of oil that made the Osage the wealthiest per-capita community in the world at the same time as it assured their demise at the hands of white-skinned predators.
As told in David Grann’s 2017 book, these wolves – captained by the ostensibly charitable William Hale (here played by a terrifyingly genteel Robert De Niro) – saw in the Osage a manifest destiny and executed their pursuit of it with a ritualistic mindset. By the time we’re introduced to Leonardo DiCaprio’s newly returned war veteran Ernest Burkhart, Hale’s nephew, wearing a scumbag’s smirk and eyes of feral, unfocused intensity, plans have already been put into motion—not because the villains of this movie and the real-life “Reign of Terror” it’s based on made a conscious decision to destroy themselves morally at the altar of money, but rather, we sense, because they were aware of no other option upon seeing Osage families’ Buicks and mansions and comforts.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” has barely educated us about the tribe’s luxuries when it interrupts itself for the uneasiest of montages: images of dead Osage neighbors, most of them young, having all succumbed mysteriously and “with no investigation.” As uttered by Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Burkhart, the Osage woman who will marry Ernest and personify her tribe's erosion at his hands, the words drill themselves into your psyche while setting the stage for the smoldering swirl of sensations to come over the next three hours. Yes, the movie’s mammoth runtime is earned, if for no other reason than this stylistic and tonal about-face from Osage comforts to Osage cataclysm is emblematic of something foundational about the agency – or lack thereof – of America’s indigenous population. With no indication that he has plans to stop telling stories anytime soon, Scorsese, now 80, is using his well-honed craft and spiritually informed storytelling to shed light on what was a darkened corner of American history for a century. And unlike the rapturously dynamic filmmaking people recall when citing “Goodfellas,” “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Taxi Driver” among the director’s most memorable works, it’s how evil bares its fangs in “Flower Moon” that makes it a different kind of considered, self-reflexive and slightly disorienting crime epic from the director who helped ushered in an era of flashier crime epics. It's ambiguous in the ways that nonetheless engross us, and unambiguous in places that haunt us.
What does this all look like in practice? In the simplest and most literal of terms: glorious. Shot in Oklahoma through the same versatile eye that brought audiences into psychological prisons, rocky Asian islands and gritty New York streets, “Killers of the Flower Moon” captures Osage vistas in such a way where you can glimpse its doom-girdled promise. We are taken through what feels like every inch of it—the spaces where tribe elders made decisions, the sacred ground where oil and potential first erupted, the shadowy creeks where members of the Osage were killed for their headrights.
These murders don’t puncture the narrative of “Killers of the Flower Moon” so much as they’re one with the various currents of a movie that shifts, not always with utmost elegance, between tense procedural, hellish marriage story and vital historical re-assessment. The key to each of these modes is the perspective on the crimes’ perpetrators that Scorsese chooses as his anchor; it’s the thing that gives the film extra weight for having been directed by him and the same thing which might still invite skepticism from those who have pined for big-budget stories about Native American history. “You wanna make it trouble, make it big,” Hale says when he reunites with Ernest. For the former, the words are philosophy, creed, operational instruction.
And for Ernest, they represent permission for him to indulge a deeply rooted rot which forms the foundation for one of DiCaprio’s most nuanced and complex performances, if not his outright best. Once upon a time Scorsese might have punctuated this meeting between Hale and Earnest – antichrist and disciple – with a raucous needle drop. But here what accompanies it is uneasy silence, and Scorsese’s insistence that we take full stock of his vision of greed, newly remodeled in ways befitting a filmmaker who has thought about these subjects for decades, and thought about the ways he's thought about it. Glitzy Copacabana dining rooms have been replaced with hellish visions of American avarice.
Mainstream American cinema has rarely displayed greed this transparently. Which is why it wouldn’t be wrong to categorize “Flower Moon” as historical horror, or Ernest as the most transfixing portrayal of Igor that the medium has ever seen (Hale here representing Frankenstein, as callous in his exploitation of the Osage as Mary Shelley's doctor was for ethics of science). Ernest lumbers about the Osage community, doing his master’s bidding to orchestrate a killing spree with barely restrained giddiness but terrifying calculation. It's a terrifying performance, made masterly for how you can just glimpse notes of self-doubt under his eyes. Perhaps Ernest is less Igor than Dr. Jekyll. The murders will eventually draw FBI investigator Tom White (Jesse Plemons) to town, an arrival that Ernest – in one of the movie’s many blackly comedic moments that serves to emphasize these murderers’ lack of humanity – reacts to like a toddler arriving at the breakfast table with his hand still stuck in the cookie jar. If the last quarter or so of "Flower Moon" is the film's wobbliest stretch, at least it resembles the inevitable crumbling of any barriers Ernest erected between himself and having to reckon with his unquestioning culpability once and for all.
Ernest and Mollie’s courtship has a similar chord of vulnerability to it. But Gladstone’s honest, subdued portrayal of a woman smart enough to know both how her community is being taken advantage and how little alternative she has as an American Indian also lends the relationship an inescapable touch of tragedy, particularly as the sickness of moral external rot makes its way through her family and finally to her. One of the driving questions of both Grann’s book and Scorsese’s movie is how much Ernest means it when she says he loves Mollie—an inquiry that carries immense reverberations not just about the depths of this real-life conspiracy but about the potential limits of Scorsese’s perspective, and where they reside in relation to our understanding of him as a filmmaker whose interrogations of mans’ cruelty have often been confused as glorification. There may be periods where we wonder whether Scorsese has strayed a bit too far from Mollie's standing in the story as the walls start to close around her husband; what might be lost in the specifics of Gladstone's exceptional performance is renewed through something else we start to see in DiCaprio's: the prickliest, most cowardly strokes of conviction in a man who finally has nowhere else to turn.
What gives the film moral potency is our feeling that Ernest, Mollie and practically everyone else – the confusing network of hitmen, the faces of lawmen trying to stop a genocide, the Osage Indians aware of their disadvantaged positions – know all too well the parts they play in this tale. It feels, intentionally, I think, like dress rehearsal even before we get to an unforgettable final stretch that drives home stark truths about the meeting place of crime and entertainment in our media, and perhaps about Scorsese’s own involvement in that clash. Unlike Grand’s book, styled as more of a page-turning thriller, Scorsese’s movie doesn’t pretend that it’s holding any grand reveals or secrets at bay; you see the decisions clear as day in Hale’s glare and Molly’s skepticism.
The effect is that this history is fashioned as borderline cosmic or preordained; there's no learning the story of the Osage without learning how Hale, Ernest and company ensured death would serve as the footnote. Power executes, but greed capitulates—and in “Killers of the Flower Moon” that makes greed a far more slippery and dangerous force.
"Killers of the Flower Moon" is rated R for violence, some grisly images and language. It's now in theaters. Runtime: three hours, 26 minutes.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons
Directed by Martin Scorsese, adapted by Scorsese and Eric Roth from the 2017 book by David Grann
2023
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